I have a friend who likes to make fun of me, saying, “You’re always looking for a new car, but you never buy one.” Which, although it makes me feel personally attacked, I have to admit it is true. I am always looking for a new car and I almost never buy one. It is because I always have my eye out for something but I want an amazing deal. I want the kind of deal that makes me know that I got the best deal and it won’t get better two months from now.
This all got worse because we are living in the midst of a weird market for all kinds of goods right now. We have to think about supply chain issues. Two years ago, did you imagine the term ‘supply chain’ would enter your daily concerns and vocabulary? Then there is inflation. Until the last twelve months, I never once thought the concept was something I needed to consider. There are volatile markets. The prices of goods and services shift upward and our wages stay stagnant. This is a good opportunity to be clear about something really important: The people Jesus walked with had no categories for any of this. Their anxieties came from worry about war and famine and infant mortality and food insecurity. Though our anxieties include these things, they may be so nuanced as to keep us constantly on the edge of our seats and our sanity, because they turn into far too many things to worry about.
John 12:1-8 tells the story of Mary anointing Jesus with expensive perfume. It is a rich vignette that shows the economic world of the Bible quite well. Mary offers sacrificially. Jesus receives with grace. Judas criticizes. The reader looks on. It reads like a drama with an omniscient narrator. That same one lets us in on so many little secrets. We hear we’re at a dinner in honor of Jesus, yet, surprisingly, we don’t hear that the honor is because he raised Lazarus from the dead. We may think that’s why because we are asked to notice that Lazarus reclines at the table instead of laying in the grave, but we are forced to make assumptions. When we see Mary with a jar of perfume, the narrator lets us in on the secret that it is very expensive, perhaps more expensive than the aforementioned car might cost me if I would actually buy one. Then when the perfume is poured, we’re invited to imagine the house filling with fragrance.
When Judas gets mouthy about the waste, the narrator cannot help but clap back in the commentary by saying Judas was a thief. The narrator tells us so many little secrets, so many opportunities to see the story with the layers and fullness with which it is meant to be received.
Because we know how the story ends, it is easy to make Judas only a bad guy, only wrong. If we reject the last little secret, we can attempt to see Judas in the best possible light, and see Judas as using his criticism in a way that is meant to make a difference. Seriously, what if Mary had used a year’s wages to help the poor? How many lives could have been changed by her generosity? I think there would have probably been lots of people who could have been helped by that money. Judas is actually not completely wrong when he says it could or should have been given to the poor. The narrator gives a little dig at Judas by calling him a thief, but even a thief can be right on the bigger point. Deuteronomy 15:11, a part of the Law of Moses, says, “Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That’s why I’m giving you this command: you must open your hand generously to your fellow Israelites, to the needy among you, and to the poor who live with you in your land.” Judas is right according to the law.
But neither Deuteronomy nor Judas’ point calls into question the very nature of poverty. Jesus does both when he quotes the scripture back to Judas. In one sentence, he highlights the nature of global finance, both past, and present, when he says, “You will always have the poor with you.” It begs an important question: Why will there always be the poor? Is it because God made it that way? Or is it because of something else altogether?
In fact, thinking back to the context in which Jesus was speaking, why were there poor people in a largely agrarian context? The answer from my limited understanding of history and ancient Palestinian economics is that war, violence, theft, and clashing empires were to blame. One of the key ways an army was paid in the ancient world was to let them take anything they wanted from conquered lands. That meant people lost their homesteads, any money they had saved. Wives and children were taken as slaves. In this society, you also had guys like Zacchaeus who took taxes well beyond the peoples’ ability to pay to continue funding the same army that conquered them. The poor you will always have with you. Why? Empires. Violence. War. Forced migration. Famine.
In America, the reasons are often difficult to decipher. There is no invading army stealing from us. Although we see it in the news, we do not necessarily experience it ourselves. We are not typically surrounded by violent theft. Again, we see pockets of this in our country. We see the fruit of forced migration and governments unwilling to accept refugee populations with little or no options. But because we are ‘better off’ than many we see around us, we often don’t see ourselves as co-sufferers in that system. Most of us reading blogs on the internet are not unhoused. Most have enough to eat. So we don’t see ourselves as suffering alongside the oppressed and marginalized among us.
The truth is we are taught something insidious from a very young age. Our culture teaches us that you what you produce. Your productivity is how you maintain your human dignity. Our productivity is the key metric by which we are judged. When we realize this, we begin to see that we human beings and our labor have been commodified. We are no different than hogs or aluminum and our human capital can be traded in much the same way as those non-human commodities. This insidious teaching says that if we work hard enough, produce enough, and create enough value for the marketplace, only then are we worthy, and only then will we be rewarded.
Lessons like these do not have to be said aloud in order for us to receive them and believe them. The message that we must produce to be valuable is in every sports movie, every business movie, every Horatio Alger news story, and every biopic. These stories may not communicate the idea overtly, but the covert message is the same: If they can do it, you can too! The only reason you are failing is that you are a failure.
Recently I was watching King Richard with my family. No, I’m not going to talk about Will Smith’s slap. I’m just too tired. You probably are too. If you haven’t watched the movie, it is the story of Venus and Serena Williams, and more importantly to the point of the movie, it is about their father Richard Williams. He found himself in Compton in the early nineties, a very violent time in the city’s history, and he believed that the only way out for his daughters was for them to be exceptional performers in whatever area they chose. Whether it was by becoming doctors or lawyers… or tennis stars, these young women had to produce to be able to leave their community and a life of suffering behind.
But if you try to take a moral away from the movie, a key teaching for how to live our lives, it is that if you plan well enough and work hard enough, you and everyone else can do it too. There is nothing wrong with our system or society, it is just plain laziness or lack of vision and planning that keeps the ‘losers’ down. This is a story that we have been taught without being told. And the deeper piece is this: The value of a human is what she is able to accomplish. That our dignity is built on what we build.
But in the story of John 12, Mary sees through it. She sees that kind of dignity as being either wrong or incomplete. Jesus says that she knows he is going to die. She knows that he is marching to Jerusalem and that it will probably not be a round-trip journey. This sojourn will end up with his death, not his being crowned king. Knowing this, instead of throwing him a funeral after he dies, she thinks her sacrifice, the perfume, is being better used in his life so that he may know right now how much she loves him.
What follows is a scene that challenges traditional definitions of dignity. She takes that perfume and pours it out prodigally, that is, recklessly, wastefully, upon Jesus’ feet. She gets close enough to his feet that she can wipe the excess with her hair. It is a display that would be hard for us to watch. Some of us may agree with Judas and we judge her for her waste. Others may agree with the Pharisees who would say it is inappropriate for a woman who was not his wife to be so close and vulnerable with Jesus. Perhaps we agree with the mean girl from high school and we just call the situation ‘tragic’ because we can’t quite put our finger on why this challenges our notions of dignity.
Yet if dignity really is what we tend to make its definition: “worthy of honor or respect,” then Mary and her gift are exactly that: worthy of honor, worthy of respect. She sees through the false reality of the world and knows that the value of a human being is not just found in her success or what she produces, but the value of a human being is truly found in the image of God that is within each of us and in the closeness of relationships that we have. She trades a traditional dignity for one marked by closeness and connection.
The false reality we experience asks us to trade that kind of dignity for one that serves the rich and powerful. It tells us that they all worked really hard to be where they are and that they deserve it. Then we look to Jesus on the cross and we see the blood and the pain and know that the world crucifies those wrapped in true dignity. Even still, Jesus never asked us to pick up our dignity. Jesus asked us to pick up our cross. May we never put it down.